
THE 


NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY: 



BY 




REV. EDWARD W. BLYDEN, A. M., 

1 5 

Fulton Professor in Liberia College, Monrovia, West Africa. 


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The author of the following treatise is a person of unmixed African 
extraction, born at St. Thomas, W. I., August 3,1832, came to the United 
States in 1850, with the hope of securing admission to one of the Colleges 
in this country. The deep-seated prejudice against his race preventing 
the consummation of his wishes, he embarked, under the auspices of 
the Colonization Society for Liberia, reaching Monrovia, January 26, 
1851. 

He promptly entered the Alexander High School, and, in 1858, was 
placed in full charge of that useful Institution, continuing until 1861, 
when he was appointed a Professor in Liberia College. Ever looking 
forward to the Ministry, he was ordained by the Presbytery of West 
Africa in 1858. 

Professor Blyden passed the summer of 1866 at the Syrian Protestant 
College, on Mount Lebanon, Syria, studying Arabic, and is now teach¬ 
ing that language in the College at Monrovia. The effect already pro¬ 
duced is as wonderful as interesting—numerous chiefs, headmen, and 
Mohammedan priests showing much, concern in the work, some of 
them having traveled several hundred miles from the interior of Africa 
to visit Liberia and see and converse with him. 

Teage, Benson, Warner, Crummell, Blyden, and others in Liberia 
have shown that negroes of the darkest hue may possess eminent 
ability. And that in other lands the same incentive, under only the 
same fostering circumstances and the like favorable opportunities which 
have brought to the light the great minds of all ages, is needed to de¬ 
velop the talent of the negro race equally with those who have possessed 
a superiority attained by the educational influences of centuries. May 
we not hope that the black man in the United States of America will 
soon possess the stimulus now enjoyed by his brethren of the Republic 
of Liberia, and thus be enabled to rival them in scholarship and become, 
equally with them, the benefactors of mankind? 

BENJAMIN COATES. 


Philadelphia, July 1,1869. 






THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. 


Presuming that no believer in the Bible will admit that the 
negro had his origin at the head waters of the Nile, on the 
banks of the G-ambia, or in the neighborhood of the Zaire, we 
should like to inquire by what chasm is he separated from 
other descendants of Noah, who originated the great works of 
antiquity, so that with any truth it can be said that “ if all 
that negroes of all generations have ever done were to be 
obliterated from recollection forever the world would lose no 
great truth, no profitable art, no exemplary form of life. The 
loss of all that is African would offer no memorable deduction 
from anything but the earth’s black catalogue of crimes.”* 
In singular contrast with the disparaging statements of the 
naval officer, Volney, the great French Oriental traveler and 
distinguished linguist, after visiting the wonders of Egypt and 
Ethiopia, exclaims, as if in mournful indignation, “How are 
we astonished when we reflect that to the race of negroes, 
at present our slaves and the objects of our extreme contempt, 
we owe our arts and sciences, and even the very use of 
speech!” And we do not see how, with the records of the 
past accessible to us, it is possible to escape from the conclu¬ 
sions of Yolney. If it cannot be shown that the negro race 
was separated by a wide and unapproachable interval from 
the founders of Babylon and Nineveh, the builders of Babel 
and the Pyramids, then we claim for them a participation in 
those ancient works of science and art, and that not merely 
on the indefinite ground of a common humanity, but on the 
ground of close and direct relationship. 

Let us turn to the tenth chapter of Genesis, and consider 
the ethnographic allusions therein contained, receiving them 


* Commander Foote, “ Africa and the American Flag,” p. 207. 




6 


THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. 


in their own grand and catholic spirit. And we the more 
readily make our appeal to this remarkable portion of Holy 
Writ, because it has “extorted the admiration of modern eth¬ 
nologists, who continually find in it anticipations of their 
greatest discoveries/’ Sir Henry Rawlinson says of this 
chapter: “ The Toldoth Beni Noah (the Hebrew title of the 
chapter) is undoubtedly the most authentic record we possess 
for the affiliation of those branches of the human race which 
sprang from the triple stock of the Noachidse.” And again: 
“We must be cautious in drawing direct ethnological infer¬ 
ences from the linguistic indications of a very early age. It 
would be far safer , at any rate, in these early times, to follow 
the general scheme of ethnic affiliation which is given in the 
tenth chapter of Genesis.”* 

From the second to the fifth verse of this chapter we have 
the account of the descendants of Japheth and their places of 
residence, but we are told nothing of their doings or their 'pro¬ 
ductions. From the twenty-first verse to the end of the chapter 
we have the account of the descendants of Shem and of their 
•“ dwelling.” Nothing is said of their works. But how different 
the account of the descendants of Cush, the eldest son of Ham, 
contained from the seventh to the twelfth verse. We read: 
“And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in 
the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord. . . . And 
the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, 
and Calneh, in the land of Shinar. Out of that land he went 
forth into Asshur, (marginal reading,) and builded Nineveh, 
and the city Rehobotb, and Calah, and Resen between Nineveh 
and Calah: the same is a great city.” 

We have adopted the marginal reading in our English Bible, 
which represents Nimrod as having founded Nineveh, in addi¬ 
tion to the other great works which he executed. This read¬ 
ing is supported by authorities, both Jewish and Christian, 
which cannot be set aside. The author of “Foundations of 
History,” without, perhaps, a due consideration of the original, 
affirms that Asshur was “one of the sons of Shem!” thus 
despoiling the descendants of Ham of the glory of having 


♦Quoted by G. Rawlinson in Notes to “Bampton Lectures,” 1859. 



THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. 


7 


“builded ” Nineveh. And to confirm this view he tells us that 
“Micah speaks of the land of Asshur- and the land of Nimrod 
as two distinct countries.” We have searched in vain for the 
passage in which the Prophet makes such a representation. 
The verse to which this author directs us (Micah v: 6) is un¬ 
fortunate for this theory. It is plain from the closing of the 
verse that the conjunction “and,” in the first clause, is not 
the simple copulative and or also , but is employed, according 
to a well-known Hebrew usage, in th*e sense df even or namely , 
to introduce the words “land of Nimrod” as an explanatory 
or qualifying addition in apposition to the preceding “land of 
Assyria.” * 

We must take Asshur in Gen. x: 11, not as the subject of 
the verb “ went,” but as the name of the place whither—the 
terminus ad quern. So Hrs. Smith and Yan Dyck, eminent 
Oriental scholars, understand the passage, and so they have 
rendered it in their admirable Arabic translation of the Bible, 
recently adopted by the British and Foreign Bible Society, 
namely: “Out of that land he (Nimrod) went forth unto 
Asshur—Assyria—and builded Nineveh.” De Sola, Linden- 
thall, and Baphall, learned Jews, so translate the passage in 
their “New Translation of the Book of Genesis.” f Hr. Kaliseh, 
another Hebrew of the Hebrews, so renders the verse in his 
“Historical and Critical Commentary on Genesis.” J All these 
authorities, and others we might mention, agree that to make 
the passage descriptive of the Shemite Asshur is to do violence 
to the passage itself and its context. Asshur, moreover, is 
mentioned in his proper place in verse 22, and without the 
least indication of an intention of describing him as the founder 
of a rival empire to Nimrod.§ Says Nachmanides, (quoted by 
De Sola, etc.:) “It would be strange if Asshur, a son of Shem, 
were mentioned among the descendants of Ham, of whom 
Nimrod was one. It would be equally strange if the deeds of 

♦See Conant’s Gesenius’s Hebrew Grammar, (17th edition,) section 155, (a;) and for 
additional examples of this usage, see Judges vii, 22; 1 Sam. xvii, 40; Jer. xv, 13, 
where even represents the conjunction van (and) in the original. 

f London, 1844. 

f London, 1858. See Dr. Robinson’s view in Gesenius’s Hebrew Lexicon, under the 
word Cush. 

gSee Kitto’s Biblical Cyclopedia, article Ham. London, 1866. 



8 


THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. 


Asshur were spoken of before his birth and descent had been 
mentioned/’ 

The grammatical objection to our view is satisfactorily dis¬ 
posed of by Kalisch.* On the absence of the locale, he remarks :■ 
“ The locale, after verbs of motion, though frequently, is by no 
means uniformly applied. (1 Kings xi: 17; 2 Kings xv: 14, 
etc.) Gesenius, whose authority no one will dispute, also ad¬ 
mits the probability of the view we have taken, without raising 
any objection of grammatical structure.” 

But enough on this point. We may reasonably suppose that 
the building of the tower of Babel was also the work, princi¬ 
pally, of Cushites. For we read in the tenth verse that Kirn- 
rod’s kingdom was in the land of Shinar; and in the second 
verse of the eleventh chapter, we are told that the people who 
undertook the building of the tower “found a plain in the 
land of “ Shinar ,” which they considered suitable for the am¬ 
bitious structure. And, no doubt, in the “ scattering” which 
resulted, these sons of Ham found their way into Egypt,')' where 
their descendants—inheriting the skill of their fathers and 
guided by tradition—erected the pyramids in imitation of the 
celebrated tower. Herodotus says that the tower was six 
hundred and sixty feet high, or one hundred and seventy feet 
higher than the great pyramid of Cheops. It consisted of 
eight square towers, one above another. The winding path is 
said to have been four miles in length. Strabo calls it a 
pyramid. 

But it may be said the enterprising people who founded 
Babylon and Hineveh, settled Egypt, and built the pyramids, 
though descendants of Ham, were not black —were not negroes; 
for, granted that the negro race have descended from Ham, 
yet, when these great civilizing works were going on, the de¬ 
scendants of Ham had not yet reached that portion of Africa, 
had not come, in contact with those conditions of climate and 
atmosphere which have produced that peculiar development 
of humanity known as the Hegro. 


* Historical and Critical Commentary on Genesis. IIeb. and Eng. P. 263. 
fit is certain that Mizraim, with his descendants, settled Egypt, giving his name, 
to the country, which it still retains. The Arabic name for Egypt is Misr. In Psalm 
cv, 23, Egypt is called “ the land of Ham.” 



THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. 


9 


Well, let us see. It is not to be doubted that from the 
earliest ages the black complexion of some of the descendants 
of ISToah was known. Ham, it would seem, w r as of a com¬ 
plexion darker than that of his brothers. The root of the 
name Ham, in Hebrew, conveys the idea of hot or swarthy . 
So the Greeks called the descendants of Ham, from their black 
complexion, Ethiopians , a word signifying burnt or black face. 
The Hebrews called them Cushites, a word probably of kindred 
meaning. Moses is said to have married a Cushite or Ethiopian 
woman, that is, a black woman descended from Cush. The 
query, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin?” seems to be de¬ 
cisive as to a difference of complexion between the Ethiopian 
and the Shemite, and the etymology of the word itself deter¬ 
mines that the complexion of the former was black. The idea 
has been thrown out that the three principal colors now in 
the world—white, brown, and black—were represented in the 
ark in Japheth, Shem, and Ham. 

But were these enterprising descendants of Ham woolly¬ 
haired ?—a peculiarity which, in these days, seems to be con¬ 
sidered a characteristic mark of degradation and servility.* 
On this point let us consult Herodotus, called “the father of 
history.” He lived nearly three thousand years ago. Having 
traveled extensively in Egypt and the neighboring countries, 
he wrote from personal observation. His testimony is that of 
an eye-witness. He tells us that there were two divisions of 
Ethiopians, who did not differ at all from each other in appear¬ 
ance, except in their language and hair. “For the eastern 
Ethiopians,” he says, “are straight-haired, but those of Libya 
(or Africa) have hair more curly than that of any other 
people.” f 

He records also the following passage, which fixes the pbysi- 


* While Rev. Elias Schrenk, a German missionary laboring on the Gold Coast, in 
giving evidence on the condition of West Africa before a Committee of the House of 
Commons, in May, 1865, was making a statement of the proficiency of some of the 
natives in his school in Greek and other branches of literature, he was interrupted'by 
Mr. Cheetham, a member of the Committee, with the inquiry: “Were those young 
men of pure African blood?” “Yes,” replied Mr. Schrenk, “decidedly; thick lips and 
black skin.” “ And woolly hair? ” added Mr. Cheetham. “ And woolly hair,” subjoined 
Mr. Schrenk. (See “ Parliamentary Report on Western Africa for 1865,” p. 145.) 

f Herodotus, iii, 94; vii, 70. 



10 


THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. 


cal characteristics of the Egyptians and some of their mighty 
neighbors :*• 

“ The Colchians were evidently Egyptians, and 1 say this, 
having myself observed it before I heard it from others; and as 
it was a matter of interest to me, I inquired of both people, 
and the Colchians had more recollection of the Egyptians than 
the Egyptians had of the Colchians; yet the Egyptians said 
that they thought the Colchians had descended from the army 
of Sesostris; and I formed my conjecture, not only because they 
are black in complexion and woolly-haired , for this amounts to 
nothing, because others are so likewise etc., etc.f 

Eawlinson has clearly shownJ that these statements of 
Herodotus have been too strongly confirmed by all recent 
researches (among the cuneiform inscriptions) in comparative 
philology to be set aside by the tottering criticism of such 
superficial inquirers as the Notts and Gliddons, et id omne 
genus , who base their assertions on ingenious conjectures. 
Pindar andiEschylus corroborate the assertions of Herodotus. 

Homer, who lived still earlier than Herodotus, and who had 
also traveled in Egypt, makes frequent mention of the Ethio¬ 
pians. He bears the same testimony as Herodotus § as to their 
division into two sections, which Pope freely renders: 

“ A race divided, whom with sloping rays 
The rising and descending sun surveys.” 

And Homer seems to have entertained the very highest opin¬ 
ion of these Ethiopians. It would appear that he was so struck 
with the wonderful works of these people, which he saw in 
Egypt and the surrounding country, that he raises their 
authors above mortals, and makes them associates of the gods. 
Jupiter, and sometimes the whole Olympian family with him, 


* It is not necessary, however, to consider all Egyptians as negroes, black in com. 
pi exion and woolly-haired; this is contradicted by their mummies and portraits. 
Blumenbach discovered three varieties of physiognomy on the Egyptian paintings 
and sculptures; but he describes the general or national type as exhibiting a certain 
approximation to the negro, 
f Herodotus, ii, 104. 

X Five dreat Monarchies, vol. i, chap. 3. 
g Odyssey, i, 23, 24. 



THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. 


11 


is often made to betake himself to Ethiopia, to hold converse 
with and partake of the hospitality of the Ethiopians.* ^ 

But it may be asked, Are we to suppose that the Guinea 
negro, with all his peculiarities, is descended from these people? 
We answer, yes. The descendants of Ham, in those early 
ages, like the European nations of the present day, made ex¬ 
tensive migrations and conquests. They occupied a portion 
of two continents. While the Shemites had but little connec¬ 
tion with Africa, the descendants of Ham, on* the contrary, 
beginning their operations in Asia, spread westward and 
southward, so that as early as the time of Homer they had 
not only occupied the northern portions of Africa, but had 7 
crossed the great desert, penetrated into Soudan, and made 
their way to the West Coast. “ As far as wo know,” says that 
distinguished Homeric scholar, Mr. Gladstone, “Homer recog¬ 
nized the African coast by placing the Lotophagi upon it and 
the Ethiopians inland from the East all the way to the extreme 
West.”f 

Sometime ago Professor Owen, of the Hew York Free 
Academy, well known for his remarkable accuracy in editing 
the ancient classics, solicited the opinion of Professor Lewis, of 
the Hew York University, another eminent scholar, as to the 
localities to which Homer’s Ethiopians ought to be assigned. 
Professor Lewis gave a reply which so pleased Professor Owen 
that he gives it entire in his notes on the Odyssey, as “the 
most rational and veritable comment of any he had met with.” 

It is as follows : 

“I have always, in commenting on the passage to which you 
refer, explained it to my classes as denoting the black race, (or 
Ethiopians, as they were called in Homer’s time,) living on the 
Eastern and Western Coast of Africa—the one class inhabiting 
the country now called Abyssinia, and the other that part of 
Africa called Guinea or the Slave Coast. The common expla¬ 
nation that it refers to two divisions of Upper Egypt, separated 
by the Hile, besides, as I believe, being geographically incor¬ 
rect, (the Hile really making no such division,) does not seem 

* Iliad, i, 423; xxiii, 206. 

f Homer and the Homeric Age,” vol. iii, p. 305. 




12 


THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. 


to be of sufficient importance to warrant the strong expres¬ 
sions of the text. (Odyssey i, 22-24.) If it be said the view 
I have taken supposes too great a knowledge of geography in 
Homer, we need only bear in mind that he had undoubtedly 
visited Tyre, where the existence of the black race on the 
West of Africa had been known from the earliest times. The 
Tyrians, in their long voyages, having discovered a race on 
the West, in almost every respect similar to those better known 
in the East, would, from their remote distance from each other, 
and not knowing of any intervening nations in Africa, natur¬ 
ally style them the two extremities of the earth. Homer else¬ 
where speaks of the Pigmies, who are described by Herodotus 
and Diodorus Siculus as residing in the interior of Africa, (on 
a river which I think corresponds to what is now called the 
Eiger.) It seems to me too extravagant language, even for 
poetry, to represent two nations, separated only by a river, as 
living, one at the rising, the other at the setting sun, although 
these terms may sometimes be used for East and West. 
Besides, if I am not mistaken, no such division is recognized 
in subsequent geography/’* 

Professor Lewis says nothing of the Asiatic division of the 
Ethiopians. But since his letter was penned—more than 
twenty years ago—floods of light have been thrown upon the 
subject of Oriental antiquities by the labors of M. Botta, 
Layard, Rawlinson, Hinks, and others. Even Bunsen, not 
very long ago, declared that the “idea of an ‘Asiatic Cush 7 
was an imagination of interpreters, the child of dispair.” But 
in 1858, Sir Henry Rawlinson, having obtained a number of 
Babylonian documents more ancient than any previously dis¬ 
covered, was able to declare authoritatively that the early 
inhabitants of South Babylonia were of a cognate race with the 
primitive colonists both of Arabia and of the African Ethiopia .f 
He found their vocabulary to be undoubtedly Cushite or Ethiopian , 
belonging to that stock of tongues which in the sequel were 
everywhere more or less mixed up with the Semitic languages, 
but of which we have the purest modern specimens in the 


* Owen’s Homer’s Odyssey, (fifth edition,) p. 306. 
f Rawlinson’s Herodotus, vol. i, p. 442. 



THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. 


13 


“Mahra of Southern Arabia” and the “ Grail a of Abyssinia.” 
He also produced evidence of the widely-spread settlements of 
the children of Ham in Asia as well as Africa , and ( what is 
more especially valuable in our present inquiry) of the truth 
of the tenth chapter of Genesis as an ethnographical document 
of the highest importance.* 

How, we should like to ask, If the negroes found at this 
moment along the West and East Coast, and throughout Cen¬ 
tral Africa, are not descended from the ancient Ethiopians, 
from whom are they descended? And if they are the children 
of the Ethiopians, what is the force of the assertions continu r 
ally repeated, by even professed friends of the negro, that the 
enterprising and good-looking tribes of the continent, such as 
Jalofs, Mandingoes, and Foulahs, are mixed with the blood of 
Caucasians? j With the records of ancient history before us, 
.where is the necessity for supposing such an admixture? May 
not the intelligence, the activity, the elegant features and 
limbs of these tribes have been directly transmitted from their 
ancestors? 

“ The Foulahs have a tradition that they are the descendants 
of Phut, the son of Ham. Whether this tradition be true or 
not, it is a singular fact that they have prefixed this name to 
almost every district of any extent which they have ever oc¬ 
cupied. They have Futa-Torro, near Senegal; Futa-Bondu 
and Futa-.Tallon to the northeast of Sierra Leone.” J 

Lenormantwas of the opinion that Phut peopled Libya. 

« We gather from the ancient writers, already quoted, that 
the Ethiopians were celebrated for their beauty. Herodotus 
speaks of them as “men of large stature, very handsome , and 
long-lived.” And he uses these epithets in connection with 
the Ethiopians of West Africa , as the context shows. The 
whole passage is as follows: 

a Where the meridian declines toward the setting sun, (that 
is, southwest from Greece,) the Ethiopian territory reaches, 
being the extreme part of the habitable world. It produces 


* See article Ham, in Kitto’s Cyclopedia, last edition, 
f Bowen’s “ Central Africa,” chap, xxiii. 

X Wilson’s Western Africa, p. 79. 



14 


THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. 


much gold, huge elephants, wild trees of all kinds, ebony , and 
men of large stature, very handsome , and long-lived.”* 

Homer frequently tells us of the “ handsome Ethiopians,” 
although he and Herodotus do not employ the same Greek 
word. In Herodotus the word that describes the Ethiopians 
is a word denoting both beauty of outward form and moral 
beauty or virtue.*}’ The epithet employed by Homer to de¬ 
scribe the same people is by some commentators rendered 
“ blameless,” but by the generality “handsome.” Anthon says : 
“ It is an epithet given to all men and women distinguished by 
rank, exploits, or beauty.” Mr. Hayman, one of the latest 
and most industrious editors of Homer, has in one of his notes 
the following explanation : “ Amumon was at first an epithet 
of distinctive excellence, but had become a purely conventional 
style, as applied to a class, like our ‘honorable and gallant 
gentlemen.’” § Most scholars, however, agree with Mr. Paley,« 
another recent Homeric commentator, that the original sig¬ 
nification of the word was “handsome,” and that it nearly 
represented the kalos kagathos of the Greeks ;|| so that the 
words which Homer puts into the mouth of Thetis, when ad¬ 
dressing her disconsolate son, (Iliad, i, 423,) would be: “Yes¬ 
terday Jupiter went to Oceanus, to the handsome Ethiopians, 
to a banquet, and with him went all the gods.” It is remark¬ 
able that the Chaldee, according to Bush, has the following 
translation of Numbers xii, 1: “And Miriam and Aaron spake 
against Moses because of the beautiful woman whom he had 
married; for he had married a beautiful woman.”Compare 
with this Solomon’s declaration, “I am black but comely ,” or, 
more exactly, “ I am black and comely.” We see the wise 
man in his spiritual epithalamium selecting a black woman as 
a proper representative of the Church and of the highest 
purity. The word translated in our version black is a correct 
rendering. So Luther, schwarz. It cannot mean brown , as 
rendered by Ostervald ( brune ) and.Hiodati ( bruna .) In Lev. 
xiii, 31, 37, it is applied to hair. The verb from which the 
adjective comes is used (Job xxx, 30) of the countenance 


* Herodotus, lii, 114. 
f Liddell & Scott. 

X Anthon’s Homer, p. 491. 


§ Hayman’s Odyssey, i, 29. 

|| Paley’s Iliad, p. 215, (note.) 
f Bush, in loco. 



THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. ' 15 

blackened by disease. In. Solomon’s Song, v. 11, it is applied 
to the plumage of a raven.* In the days of Solomon, therefore, 
black, as a physical attribute, was comely. 

But when in the course of ages, the Ethiopians had wan¬ 
dered into the central and southern regions of Africa, encoun¬ 
tering a change of climate aud altered character of food and 
modes of living, they fell into intellectual and physical degra¬ 
dation. This degradation did not consist, however, in a change 
of color, as some suppose, for they were black, as we have 
seen, before they left their original seat. Nor did it consist in 
the stiffening and shortening of the hair; for Herodotus tells 
us that the Ethiopians in Asia were straight-haired, while their 
relatives in Africa, from the same stock, and in no lower stage 
of progress, were woolly-haired. The hair, then, is not a fun¬ 
damental characteristic, nor a mark of degradation. Some 
suppose that the hair of the negro is affected by some pecu¬ 
liarity in the African climate and atmosphere—perhaps the 
influence of the Sahara entering as an important element. We 
do not profess to know th efons et origo, nor have we seen any 
satisfactory cause for it assigned. We have no consciousness 
of any inconvenience from it, except that in foreign countries, 
as a jovial fellow-passenger on an English steamer once re¬ 
minded us, “if is unpopular.'' 

“Vuolsi cosl colli, dove si puote 
Cid che si vuole: e piil non dimandare.”f 

Nor should it be thought strange that the Ethiopians who 
penetrated into the heart of the African continent should have 
degenerated, when we consider their distance and isolation 
from the quickening influence of the arts and sciences in the 
East; their belief, brought with them, in the most abominable 
idolatry, “changing the glory of the incorruptible God into an 
image made like unto corruptible man, and to birds , and four- 
footed beastSr, and creeping things ,” Bom. i, 23; the ease with 
which, in the prolific regions to which they had come, they 


*A correspondent of the New York Tribune, residing in Syria, describing the ap¬ 
pearance of a negro whom he met there in 1866, says: “ He was as black as a Mount 
Lebanon raven.” (New York Tribune , October 16, 1866.) Had he been writing in 
Hebrew, he would have employed the descriptive word, 
f Dante. 



16 


THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. 


could secure the means of subsistence; and the constant and 
enervating heat of the climate, indisposing to continuous exer¬ 
tion. Students in natural history tell us that animals of the 
same species and family, if dispersed and domesticated, show 
striking modifications of the original type in their color, hair, 
integument, structure of limbs, and even in their instincts, 
habits, and powers. Similar changes are witnessed among 
mankind. An intelligent writer, in .No. 48 of the K Dublin 
University Magazine,” says: 

“ There are certain districts in Leitrim, Sligo, and Mayo 
chiefly inhabited by the descendants of the native Irish, driven 
by the British from Armagh and the South-of-Lown about two 
centuries ago. These people, whose ancestors were well-grown, 
able-bodied, and comely, are now reduced to an average stature 
of five feet two inches, are pot-bellied, bow-legged, and abor¬ 
tively featured; and they are especially remarkable for open- 
projecting mouths, and prominent teeth, and exposed gums, 
their advancing cheek-bones and depressed noses bearing bar¬ 
barism in their very front. In other words, within so short a 
period, they seem to have acquired a prognathous type of 
skull, like the Australian savage.” 

But these retrogressive changes are taking place in other 
countries besides Ireland. Acute observers tell us that in 
England, the abode of the highest civilization of modern times, 
“a process of de-civilization, a relapse toward barbarism, is 
seen in the debased and degraded classes, with a coincident 
deterioration of physical type.” Mr. Henry Mayhew, in his 
“London Labor and London Poor,” has remarked that— 

“ Among them, according as they partake more or less of 
the pure vagabond nature, doing nothing whatever for their 
living, but moving from place to place, preying on the earnings 
of the more industrious portion of the community, so will the 
attributes of the nomadic races be found more or less marked 
in them ; and they are all more or less distinguished by their 
high cheek-bones and protruding jaws, thus showing that kind 
of mixture of the pyramidal with the prognathous type which 
is to be seen among the most degraded of the Malayo-Polyne- 
sian races.” 


THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. 


17 


In contrast with this retrogressive process, it may be ob¬ 
served that in proportion as the degraded races are intellect¬ 
ually and morally elevated, their physical appearance improves. 
Mr. C. S. Roundell, Secretary to the late Royal Commission 
in Jamaica, tells us that— 

“ The Maroons, who fell under my (his) own observation in 
Jamaica, exhibited a marked superiority in respect of comport¬ 
ment, mental capacity, and physical type—a superiority to be 
referred to the saving effects of long-enjoyed freedom. The 
Maroons are descendants of runaway Spanish slaves, who, at 
the time of the British conquest, established themselves in the 
mountain fastnesses.” * 

In visiting the native towns interior to Liberia, we have 
seen striking illustrations of these principles. Among the in¬ 
habitants of those towns, we could invariably distinguish the 
free man from the slave. There was about the former a dig¬ 
nity of appearance, an openness of countenance, an indepen¬ 
dence of air, a firmness of step, which indicated the absence of 
oppression; while in the latter there was a depression of coun¬ 
tenance, a general deformity of appearance, an awkwardness 
of gait, which seemed to say, “ That man is a slave.” 

Now, with these well-known principles before us, why 
should it be considered strange that, with their fall into bar¬ 
barism, the “ handsome” Ethiopians of Homer and Herodotus 
should have deteriorated in physical type, and that this degra¬ 
dation of type should continue reproducing itself in the wilds 
of Africa and in the Western Hemisphere, where they have 
been subjected to slavery and various other forms of debasing 
proscription ? 

The negro is often taunted by superficial investigators with 
proofs, as is alleged, taken from the monuments of Egypt, of 
the servitude of negroes in very remote ages. But is there 
anything singular in the fact that in very early times negroes 
were held in bondage ? Was it not the practice among all the 
early nations to enslave each other ? Why should it be pointed 
to as an exceptional thing that Ethiopians were represented 

* “ England and her Subject Races, with special reference to Jamaica.” By Charles 
Saville Roundell, M. A. 

2 





18 


THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. 


as slaves? It was very natural that the more powerful Ethi¬ 
opians should seize upon the weaker, as is done to this day in 
certain portions of Africa, and reduce them to slavery. And 
were it not for the abounding light of Christianity now enjoyed 
in Europe the same thing would be done at •this moment in 
Rome, Paris, and London. For the sites of those cities in 
ancient times witnessed all the horrors of a cruel and mercenary 
slave-trade, not in negroes, but Caucasian selling Caucasian.* 

But were there no Caucasian slaves in Egypt? If it be true 
that no such slaves are represented on the monumental re¬ 
mains, are we, therefore, to infer that they did not exist in 
that country? Are we to disbelieve that the Jews were in the 
most rigorous bondage in that land for four hundred years? 

“Not everything which is not represented on the monu¬ 
ments was, therefore, necessarily unknown to the Egyptians. 
The monuments are neither intended to furnish, nor can they 
furnish, a complete delineation of all the branches of public and 
private life, of all the products and phenomena of the whole 
animal, vegetable, and mineral creation of the country. They 
cannot be viewed as a complete cyclopsedia of Egyptian cus¬ 
toms and civilization. Thus we find no representation of fowls 
and pigeons, although the country abounded in them ; of the 
wild ass and wild boar, although frequently met with in Egypt; 
none of the process relating to the casting of statues and other 
objects in bronze, although many similar subjects connected 
with the arts are represented; none of the marriage ceremony, 
and of numerous other subjects.”f 

But we are told that the Negroes of Central and West Africa 
have proved themselves essentially inferior, from the fact that 


* Cicero in one of his letters, speaking of the success of an expedition against 
Britain, says the only plunder to be found consisted “ Ex emancipiis; ex quibus nullos 
puto te literis aut musicis eruditos expectarethus proving, in the same sentence, 
the existence of the siave-trade. and intimating that it was impossible that any Briton 
should be intelligent enough to be worthy to serve the accomplished Atticus. (Ad. 
Att., lib. iv, 16.) Henry, in his History of England, gives us also the authority of Strabo 
for the prevalence of the slave-trade among the Britons, and tells us that slaves were 
once an established article ef export. “ Great numbers,” says he, “ were exported from 
Britain, and were to be seen exposed for sale, like cattle, in the Roman market.” 
Henry , vol. ii, p. 225. Also, Sir T. Fowell Buxton’s “Slave Trade and Remedy”— 
Introduction. 

-j-Dr. Kalisch: “Commentary on Exodus,” p. 147. London, 1855. 



THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. 


19 


in the long period of three thousand years they have shown 
no signs of progress. In their country, it is alleged, are to be 
found no indications of architectural taste or skill, or of any 
susceptibility of aesthetic or artistic improvement; that they 
have no monuments of past exploits; no paintings or sculp¬ 
tures; and that, therefore, the foreign or American slave-trade 
was an indispensable agency in the civilization of Africa; that 
nothing could have been done for the Negro while he remained 
in his own land, bound to the practices of ages; that he needed 
the sudden and violent severance from home to deliver him 
from the quiescent degradation and stagnant barbarism of his 
ancestors; that otherwise the civilization of Europe could 
never have impressed him. 

In reply to all this we remark: 1st, that it remains to he 
proved, by a fuller exploration of the interior, that there are 
no architectural remains, no works of artistic skill; 2dly, if it 
should be demonstrated that nothing of the kind exists, this 
would not necessarily prove essential inferiority on the part of 
the African. What did the Jews produce in all the long period 
of their history before and after their bondage to the Egypt¬ 
ians, among whom, it might be supposed, they would have 
made some progress in science and art? Their forefathers 
dwelt in tents before their Egyptian residence, and they dwelt 
in tents after their emancipation. And in all their long na¬ 
tional history they produced no remarkable architectural monu¬ 
ment but the Temple, which was designed and executed by a 
man miraculously endowed for the purpose. A high antiqua¬ 
rian authority tells us that “pure Shemiteshad no art.”* The 
lack of architectural and artistic skill is no mark of the absence 
of the higher elements of character.-)* 3dly, With regard to 


*Rev. Stuart Poole, of the British Museum, before the British Association. 1864 v 
-j-Rev. Dr. Goulburn, in his reply to Dr. Temple’s celebrated Essay on the “Educa* 
tion of the World,” has the following suggestive remark: “ We commend to Dr. Temple’s 
notice the pregnant fact, that in the earliest extant history of mankind it is stated that 
arts, both ornamental and useful, (and arts are the great medium of civilization,) took 
their rise in the family of Cain. In the line of Seth we find none of this mental and 
social development ,”—Replies to Essays and Reviews , p. 34. When the various causes 
now co-operating shall have produced a higher religious sense among the nations, and 
a corresponding revolution shall have taken place in the estimation now put upon 
material objects, the effort may be to show, to his disparagement—if we could imagine 
such an unamiable undertaking as compatible with the, high state of progress then 
attained—that the Negro was at the foundation of all material development. 



20 


THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. 


the necessity of the slave trade, we remark, without attempting 
to enter into the secret counsels of the Most High, that without 
the foreign slave trade Africa would have been a great deal 
more accessible to civilization, and would now, had peaceful 
and legitimate intercourse been kept up with her, from the 
middle of the fifteenth century, be taking her stand next to 
Europe in civilization, science, and religion. When, four hun¬ 
dred years ago, the Portuguese discovered this coast, they 
found the natives living in considerable peace and quietness, 
and with a certain degree of prosperity. Internal feuds, of 
course, the tribes sometimes had, but by no means so serious 
as they afterward became under the stimulating influence of 
the slave trade. From all we can gather, the -tribes in this 
part of Africa lived in a condition not very different’ from that 
of the greater portion of Europe in the Middle Ages. There 
was the same oppression of the weak by the strong; the same 
resistance by the weak, often taking the form of general rebel¬ 
lion; the same private and hereditary wars; the same strong¬ 
holds in every prominent position ; the same dependence of 
the people upon the chief who happened to be in power; the 
same contentedness of the masses with the tyrannical rule. 
But there was industry and activity, and in every town there 
were manufactures, and they sent across the continent to 
Egypt and the Barbary States other articles besides slaves. 

The permanence for centuries of the social and political 
status of the Africans at home must be attributed, first, to the 
isolation of the people from the progressive portion of man¬ 
kind; and, secondly, to the blighting influence of the traffic 
introduced among them by Europeans. Had not the demand 
arisen in America for African laborers, and had European 
nations inaugurated regular traffic with the coast, the natives 
would have shown themselves as impressible for change, as 
susceptible of improvement, as capable of acquiring knowledge 
and accumulating wealth, as the natives of Europe. Combi¬ 
nation of capital and co-operation of energies would have done 
for this land what they have done for others. Private enter¬ 
prise, (which has been entirely destroyed by the nefarious 
traffic,) encouraged by humane intercourse with foreign lands, 
would have developed agriculture, manufactures, and com- 


THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. 


21 


merce; would have cleared, drained, and fertilized the country, 
and built towns; would have improved the looms, brought in 
plows, steam-engines, printing-presses, machines, and the thou¬ 
sand processes and appliances by which the comfort, progress, 
and usefulness of mankind are secured. But, alas! Bis aliter 
visum. 

“ Freighted with curses was the bark that bore 
The spoilers of the West Guinea’s shore; 

Heavy with groans of anguish blew the gales 
That swelled that fatal bark’s returning sails : 

Loud and perpetual o’er the Atlantic’s waves, 

For guilty ages, rolled the tide of slaves; 

A tide that knew no fall, no turn, no rest— 

Constant as day and night from East to West, 

Still widening, deepening, swelling in its course 
With boundless ruin and resistless force.” —Montgomery. 

But although, amid the violent shocks of those changes and 
disasters to which the natives of this outraged land have been 
subject, their knowledge of the elegant arts, brought from the 
East, declined, they never entirely lost the necessary arts of 
life. They still understand the workmanship of iron, and, in 
some sections of the country, of gold. The loom and the forge 
are in constant use among them. In remote regions, where 
they have no intercourse with Europeans, they raise large 
herds of cattle and innumerable sheep and goats; capture and 
train horses, build well-laid-out towns, cultivate extensive 
fields, and manufacture earthenware and woolen and cotton 
cloths. Commander Foote says: “The negro arts are respect¬ 
able, and would have been more so had not disturbance and 
waste come with the slave trade/’* 

And in our own times, on the West Coast of Africa, a native 
development of literature has been brought to light of genuine 
home-growth. The Yey people, residing half way between 
Sierra Leone and Cape Mesurado, have within the last thirty 
years invented a syllabic alphabet, with which they are now 
writing their own language, and by which they are maintain¬ 
ing among themselves an extensive epistolary correspondence. 
In 1849 the Church Missionary Society in London, having 
heard of this invention, authorized their Missionary, "Rev. S. 
W. Koelle, to investigate the subject. Mr. Koelle traveled 


♦“Africa and the American Flag.” p. 52. 



22 


THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. 


into the interior, and brought away three manuscripts, with 
translations. The symbols are phonetic, and constitute a 
svllabarium, not an alphabet; they are nearly two hundred 
in number. They have been learned so^ generally that Vey 
boys in Monrovia frequently receive communications from 
their friends in the Yey country, to which they readily re¬ 
spond. The Church Missionary Society have had a font of 
type cast in this new character, and several little tracts have 
been printed and circulated among the tribe. The principal 
inventor of this alphabet is now dead; but it is supposed that 
he died in the Christian faith, having acquired some knowledge 
of the way of salvation through the medium of this character 
of his own invention.* Dr. Wilson says: 

“ This invention is one of the most remarkable achievements 
of this or any other age, and is itself enough to silence forever 
the cavils and sneers of those who think so contemptuously of 
the intellectual endowments of the African "race.” 

Though ■“ the idea of communicating thoughts in writing 
was probably suggested by the use of Arabic among the Man- 
dingoes,” yet the invention was properly original, showing the 
existence of genius in the native African, who has never been 
in foreign slavery, and proves that he carries in his bosom 
germs of intellectual development and self-elevation, which 
would have enabled him to advance regularly in the path of 
progress had it not been for the blighting influence of the slave 
trade. 

Mow are we to believe that such a people have been doomed, 
by the terms of any curse, to be the “ servant of servants,” as 
some upholders of Negro slavery have taught? Would it not 
have been a very singular theory that a people destined to 
servitude should begin, the very first thing, as we have en¬ 
deavored to show,to found “great cities,” organize kingdoms, 
and establish rule—putting up structures which have come 
down to this day as a witness to their superiority over all their 
contemporaries—and that, by a Providential decree, the people 
whom they had been fated to serve should be held in bondage 
by them four hundred years? 


^Wilson’s “ Western Africa,” p. 95, and “Princeton Review for July, 1858,” p. 488. 



THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. 


23 


“ The remarkable enterprise of the Cushite hero, Nimrod ; 
his establishment of imperial power, as an advance on patri¬ 
archal government; the strength of the Egypt of Mizraim, and 
its long domination qver the house of Israel; and the evidence 
which now and then appears, that even Phut (who is the ob¬ 
scurest in his fortunes of all the Hamite race) maintained a 
relation to the descendants of Shem which was far from servile 
or subject; do all clearly tend to limit the application of Noah’s 
maledictory prophecy to the precise terms in which it was in¬ 
dited: ‘Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he’ 
(not Cush, not Mizraim, not Phut, but he) ‘be to his brethren.’ 
If we then confine the imprecation to Canaan, we can without 
difficulty trace its accomplishment in the subjugation of the 
tribes which issued from him to the children of Israel from the 
time of Joshua to that of David. Here would be verified Ca¬ 
naan’s servile relation to Shem; and when imperial Rome 
finally wrested the scepter from Judah, and, ‘dwelling in 
the tents of Shem,’ occupied the East and whatever remnants 
of Canaan were left in it, would not this accomplish that fur¬ 
ther prediction that Japheth, too, should be lord of Canaan, 
and that (as it would seem to be tacitly implied) mediately, 
through his occupancy of the tents of Shem?”* 

A vigorous writer in the “Princeton Review” has the fol¬ 
lowing: 

“ The Ethiopian race, from whom the modern Negro or Afri¬ 
can stock are undoubtedly descended, can claim as early a 
history, with the exception of the Jews,f as any living people 
on the face of the earth. History, as well as the monumental 
discoveries, gives them a place in ancient history as far back 
as Egypt herself, if not farther. But what has become of the 
contemporaneous nations of antiquity, as well as others of 
much later origin? Where are the Numidians, Mauritanians, 
and other powerful names, who once held sway over all North¬ 
ern Africa? They have been swept away from the earth, or 
dwindled down to a handful of modern Copts and Berbers of 
doubtful descent.” * 


* Dr. Peter Holmes, Oxford, England. 

f The Jews not excepted. Where were they when the Pyramids were built? 



24 


THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. 


“ The Ethiopian, or African race, on the other hand, though 
they have long since lost all the civilization which once existed 
on the Upper Nile, have, nevertheless, continued to increase 
and multiply, until they are now, with Jhe exception of the 
Chinese, the largest single family of men on the face of the 
earth. They have extended themselves in every direction over 
that great continent, from the southern borders of the Great 
Sahara to the Cape of Good Hope, and from the Atlantic to 
the Indian Ocean, and are thus constituted masters of at least 
three-fourths of the habitable portions of this great continent. 
And this progress has been made, be it remembered, in despite 
of the prevalence of the foreign slave trade, which has carried 
off so many of their people; of the ceaseless internal feuds and 
wars that have been waged among themselves; and of a con¬ 
spiracy, as it were, among all surrounding nations, to trample 
out their national existence. Surely their history is a remark¬ 
able one; but not more so, perhaps, than is foreshadowed in 
the prophecies of the Old Testament Scriptures. God has 
watched over and preserved these people through all the vicis¬ 
situdes of their unwritten history, and no doubt for some great 
purpose of mercy toward them, as well as for the display of 
the glory of His own grace and providence; and we may expect 
to have a full revelation of this purpose and glory as soon as 
the everlasting Cospel is made known to these benighted 
millions.” * 

One palpable reason may be assigned why the Ethiopian 
race has continued to exist under the most adverse circum¬ 
stances, while other races and tribes have perished from the 
earth; it is this: They have never been a blood-thirsty or avari¬ 
cious people. From the beginning of their history to the 
present time their work has been constructive, except when 
they have been stimulated to wasting war by the covetous 
foreigner. They have built up in Asia, Africa, and America. 
They have not delighted in despoiling and oppressing others. 
The nations enumerated by the reviewer just quoted, and 
others besides them—all warlike and fighting nations—have 
passed away or dwindled into utter insignificance. They 


♦“Princeton Review, July, 1858,” pp. 448, 449. 



THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. 


25 


seem to have been consumed by their own fierce internal pas¬ 
sions. The Ethiopians, though brave and powerful, were not 
a fighting people, that is, were not fond of fighting for the 
sake of humbling and impoverislfing other people. Every 
reader of history will remember the straightforward, brave, 
and truly Christian answer returned by the King of the Ethi¬ 
opians to Cambys^s, who was contemplating an invasion of 
Ethiopia, as recorded by Herodotus. For the sake .of those 
who may not have access to that work we reproduce the nar¬ 
rative here. About five hundred years before Christ, Camby- 
ses, the great Persian warrior, while invading Egypt, planned 
an expedition against the Ethiopians; but before proceeding 
upon the belligerent enterprise he sent “spies, in the first in¬ 
stance, who were to see the table of the sun, which was said 
to exist among the Ethiopians, and besides, to explore other 
things, and, to cover their design, they were to carry presents 
to the King. * * * When the messengers of Cambyses 

arrived among the Ethiopians, they gave the presents to the 
King, and addressed him as follows: ‘Cambyses, King of the 
Persians, desirous of becoming your friend and ally, has sent 
us, bidding us confer with you, and he presents you with these 
gifts, which are such as he himself most delights in.’” 

But the Ethiopian, knowing that they came as spies, spoke 
thus to them: 

“Neither has the King of Persia sent you with these presents 
to me because he valued my alliance, nor do you speak the 
truth, for you are come as spies of my kingdom. Nor is he 
a just man; for if he were just he would not desire any other 
territory than his own; nor would he reduce people into ser¬ 
vitude who have done him no injury. However, give him this 
bow, and say these words to him: ‘ The King of the Ethiopians 
advises the King of the Persians, when the Persians can thus 
easily draw a bow of this size, then to make war on the Macro- 
bian Ethiopians with more numerous forces; but until that 
time let him thank the gods, who have not inspired the sons 
of the Ethiopians with the desire of adding another land to 
their own.’”* 


3 


*Herqdotus, iii, 17-22. 



26 


THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. 


Are these a people, with such remarkable antecedents, and 
in the whole of whose history the hand of God is so plainly 
seen, to be treated with the contempt which they usually suffer 
in the lands of their bondage? When we notice the scornful 
indifference with which the Negro is spoken of by certain politi¬ 
cians in America, we fancy that the attitude of Pharaoh and 
the aristocratic Egyptians must have been precisely similar 
toward the Jews. We fancy we see one of the magicians in 
council, after the first visit of Moses demanding the release of 
the Israelites, rising up with indignation and pouring out a 
torrent of scornful invective such as any rabid anti-Negro poli¬ 
tician might now indulge in. 

What privileges are those that these degraded Hebrews are 
craving? What are they? Are they not slaves and the de- 
scendapts of slaves? What have they or their ancestors ever 
done ? What can they do ? They did not come hither of their 
own accord. The first of them was brought to this country a 
slave, sold to us by his own brethren. Others followed him, 
refugees from the famine of an impoverished country. What 
do they know about managing liberty or controlling themselves? 
They are idle; they are idle. Divert their attention from their 
idle dreams by additional labor and more exacting tasks. 

But what have the ancestors of Negroes ever done? Let 
Professor Eawlinson answer, as a summing up of our discus¬ 
sion. Says the learned Professor*: 

>u For the last three thousand years the world has been 
• mainly indebted for its advancement to the Semitic and Indo- 
European races; but it was otherwise in the first ages. Egypt 
and Babylon, Mizraim and Nimrod, both descendants of Ham, 
led the way, and acted as the pioneers of mankind in the 
various untrodden fields of art, literature, and science. Alpha¬ 
betic writing, astronomy, history, chronology, architecture, 
plastic art, sculpture, navigation, agriculture, textile industry, 
seem all of them to have had their origin in one or other of 
these two countries. The beginnings may have been often 
humble enough. We may laugh at the rude picture-writing; 
the uncouth brick pyramid, the course fabric, the homely and 
ill-shapen instruments, as they present themselves to our no¬ 
tice in the remains of these ancient nations; but they are 
really worthier of our admiration than of our ridicule. The 


THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. 


27 


inventors of any art are among the greatest benefactors of 
their race, and mankind at the present day lies under infinite 
obligations to the genius of these early ages/’ * 

There are now, probably, few thoughtful and cultivated men 
in the United States who are prepared to advocate the ap¬ 
plication of the curse of Noah to all the descendants of Ham. 
The experience of the last eight years must have convinced 
the most ardent theorizer on the subject. Facts have not 
borne out their theory and predictions concerning the race. 
The Lprd by His'outstretched arm has dashed their syllogisms 
to atoms, scattered their dogmas to the winds, detected the 
partiality and exaggerating tendency of their method, and 
shown the injustice of that heartless philosophy and that un¬ 
relenting theology which consigned a whole race of men to 
hopeless and interminable servitude. 

It is difficult, nevertheless, to understand how, with the 
history of the past accessible, the facts of the present before 
their eyes, and the prospect of a clouded future, or unvailed 
only to disclose-the indefinite numerical increase of Europeans 
in the land, the blacks of the United States can hope for any 
distinct, appreciable influence in the country. We cannot 
perceive on what grounds the most sanguine among their 
friends can suppose that there will be so decisive a revolution 
of popular feeling in favor of their proteges as to make thorn 
at once the political and social equals of their former masters. 
Legislation cannot secure them this equality in the United 
States any more than it has secured it for the blacks in the 
West Indies. During the time of slavery everything in the 
laws, in the customs, in the education of the people w-as con¬ 
trived with the single view of degrading the Negro in hia.own 
estimation and that of others. Now is it possible to change 
in a day the habits and character which centuries of oppres¬ 
sion have entailed? We think not. More than one generation, 
it appears to us, must pass away before the full effect of edu¬ 
cation, enlightenment, and social improvement will be visible 
among the blacks. Meanwhile-they are being gradually ab¬ 
sorbed by the Caucasian; and before their social equality comes 
to be conceded they will have lost their identity altogether, a 


Five Great Monarchies/’ vol. i, pp. 75, 76. 





28 


THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT HISTORY. 


result, in our opinion, extremely undesirable, as we believe 
that, as Negroes, they might accomplish a great work which 
others cannot perform. But even if they should not pass away 
in the mighty embrace £>f their numerous white neighbors; 
grant that they could continue to live in the land, a distinct 
people, with the marked peculiarities they possess, having the 
same color and hair, badges Of a former thraldom—is it to be 
supposed that they can ever overtake a people who so largely 
outnumber them, and a large proportion of whom are endowed 
with wealth, leisure, and the habits and means of study and 
self-improvement? If they improve in culture and training, 
as in time they no doubt will, and become intelligent and edu¬ 
cated, there may rise up individuals among them, here and 
there, who will be respected and honored by the whites; but 
it .is plain that, as a class, their inferiority will never cease 
until they cease to be a distinct people, possessing peculiarities 
which suggest antecedents of servility and degradation. 

We pen these lines with the most solemn feelings—grieved 
that so many strong, intelligent, and energetic black men 
should be wasting time and labor in a fruitless contest, which, 
expended in the primitive land of their fathers—a land that so 
much needs them—would produce in a comparatively short 
time results of incalculable importance. But what can we do? 
Occupying this distant stand-point—an area of Negro freedom, 
arid a scene for untrammeled growth and development, but a 
wide and ever-expanding field for benevolent effort; an outly¬ 
ing or surrounding wilderness to be reclaimed; barbarism of 
ages to be brought over to Christian life—we can only repeat 
with # undiminished earnestness the wish we have frequently 
expressed elsewhere, that the eyes of the blacks may be opened 
to discern their true mission and destiny; that, making their es¬ 
cape from the house of bondage, they may betake themselves to 
their ancestral home , and assist in constructing a Christian Afri¬ 
can empire. For we believe that as descendants of Ham had 
a share, as the most prominent actors on the scene, in the 
founding of cities and in the organization of government, so 
members of the same family, developed under different circum¬ 
stances, will have an important part in the closing of the great 
drama. 

“ Time’s noblest offspring is the last.” 


I 


LIBERIA: 

PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE 


■A.1ST ADDRESS 


DELIVERED JULY 26, 1866, ON MOUNT LEBANON, SYRIA, 


AT THE CELEBRATION OF THE 


incRtnffi jlnnkmavn of tlic I lulcjn'mll'iici! of ftkria, 


HELD BY 


AMERICAN MISSIONARIES AND OTHER CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES 

RESIDING IN SYRIA, 


BY 


X 


REY. EDWARD W. BLYDENT, A. M., 

V* * 

Fulton Professor in Liberia College. 


WASHINGTON CITY: 

M'GILL & WITHEROW, PRINTERS AND STEREOTYPERS. 

1869 . 






LIBERIA-PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. 


Ladies and Gentlemen: It was the suggestion of my friend, 
the President of the Syrian Protestant College,* that, as there 
was sojourning on Mount Lebanon a citizen of Liberia, the 
nineteenth anniversary of the independence of that Eepublic 
should not be allowed to pass by without some suitable demon¬ 
stration on the part of the missionaries and other citizens of 
the United States now residing here. It was, therefore, pro¬ 
posed that the day should be celebrated in as fine style as the 
very short notice would permit. The Consul of the United 
States f at once approved the idea, and generously proffered 
the use and hospitalities of his house for the purpose; and to 
your humble servant was assigned the task of delivering, on 
the heights of Lebanon, a Twenty-Sixth of July Oration. 

In acceding to the request to fill this honorable position, I 
promised to occupy not more than half an hour in the perform¬ 
ance of the duty; but one present, who was to take a very 
prominent part in making the preparations for the occasion, 
insisted that it would be hardly worth while to make any 
preparation, and invite friends from the neighboring village, 
just to hear an address of half an hour on Liberia; and as the 
person thus remonstrating belonged to that sex whose mere 
word gallantry makes law, I beg that you will attach no re¬ 
sponsibility to me, if, under the pressure of the inexorable en¬ 
actment, I should be so unfortunate as to weary your patience 
while I call your attention to Liberia—past, present, and 
future. 

The great epochs of the history, whether of mankind gener¬ 
ally or of one particular section of the human race, are not 


Rev. Daniel Bliss, D. D. 


f J. Augustus Johnson, Esq, of Beirut. 




6 


LIBERIA—PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. 


unusually preceded by occurrences more or less extraordinary. 
These occurrences, cursorily viewed, inspire opinions as to 
their ultimate results, which subsequent experience and the 
development of the results themselves prove to have been en¬ 
tirely erroneous; and often what would seem to be the natural 
and necessary interpretation of the tendency of any particular 
train of events is discovered to be as wide from the truth as 
possible. Hence, while there may be formed the most plausible 
conjectures as to the true character and bearing of any given 
circumstance or combination of circumstances, the uncertainty 
of results necessarily precludes the possibility of a just appre¬ 
ciation of any event at the time of its occurrence. 

The hatred which, we learn from sacred story, existed in 
the large family of Jewish brothers against one of their number, 
upon whom the head of the family seemed to lavish all the 
affection of old age, the bitterness with which they persecuted 
him, and the unnatural and cruel indifference with which they 
consigned him to slavery, were circumstances which seemed to 
justify the anticipation that the object of their malignity would 
suffer, pine away, and die in miserable obscurity. But his 
bondage was the means of introducing him to a position, 
whence in after years, during a period of pressing exigency, 
he could administer to the relief and deliverance of the whole 
family. So before the permanent establishment of the nation 
which God had chosen to be the depository of His will, and to 
preserve a knowledge of Himself amid the general apostasy of 
mankind—whose conservative character was to influence, either 
remotely or directly, other portions of the human family—they 
must go down into Egypt, and there, in a land of strangers, be 
afflicted “four hundred years;” their moral and intellectual 
powers must pass under the withering and blighting influence 
of a pernicious bondage—circumstances which seemed entirely 
at variance with the preparation required by a people destined 
to occupy the high and important position which the Jews 
afterward filled in the world. So, also, according to classic 
story, when there was to be established the nation which was 
to conquer the world and subject it to the dominion of law as 
preparatory to the advent of the “Prince of Peace,” one of the 
most ancient and powerful States must pass through a series 


LIBERIA—PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. 


7 


of unprecedented calamities, and, at length, levelled to the dust 
by the unsparing steel and devouring flames of relentless foes; 
from its ashes must spring forth the germ of the destined 
people—the all-conquering Eomans. 

So, again, in modern times, when the period draws near for 
the redemption and delivery of Africa from the barbarism and 
degradation of unnumbered years, there must take place cir,. 
cumstances so horrible in their character and so revolting to 
the nobler instincts of man, as to find few disposed to recognise 
in them the hand of a supreme and merciful Euler. 

“ Sunt lachrymse rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.” 

Almost coeval with the invention of printing and the dis¬ 
covery of America—two great eras in the history of human 
improvement—was the beginning of the African slave-trade. 
As soon as the empire of Europe, following the guiding “star” 
of destiny, began to move “westward,” she dragged Africa, 
rather tardy in the march of nations, along with her to the 
place which seems to have been designed for the rejuvenes¬ 
cence of Eastern senility—for the untrammeled exercise and 
healthful growth of the principles of political and ecclesiastical 
liberty, and for the more thorough development of man. And 
it cannot be denied that the Africans, when first carried to the 
Western world, were benefited. The men, under whose tutel¬ 
age they were taken, regarded them as a solemn charge, en¬ 
trusted to their care by Providence, and felt bound to instruct 
them and in every way to ameliorate their condition. They 
were not only indoctrinated into the principles of Christianity, 
but they were taught the * arts and sciences. The relation of 
the European to the African, in those unsophisticated times, 
was that of guardian and'protege. And the system, if slavery 
it was, bore a strong resemblance to slavery as it existed among 
the Eomans, in the earlier periods of their history, when the 
“slave was the teacher, the artist, the actor, the physician, the 
man of science.” Hence, many good men, in view of the bene¬ 
fits which they saw accrue from the mild and generous system, 
embarked their capital in, and gave their influence to, the en¬ 
terprise of transporting negroes from Africa. The distinguished 
William Penn, Eev. George Whitefield, and President Edwards 


8 


LIBERIA—PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. 


were slaveholders. The slave trade was regarded as a great 
means of civilizing the blacks—-a kind of missionary institution. 

But it was not long before the true character of the traffic 
began unmistakably to discover itself. Its immense gains 
brought men of various characters into competition. The 
whole Western Coast of Africa became the haunt of slave- 
traders, and the scene of unutterable cruelties as the result of 
their operations. The more powerful native chiefs, impelled 
by those avaricious and sordid feelings which, in the absence 
4 of higher motives, actuate men, made war upon their weaker 
neighbors, in order to capture prisoners to supply the demand 
of the traders; and a state of things was induced which 
awakened the commiseration and called forth the remonstrance 
of the thoughtful and philanthropic in Christian lands. Wil- 
berforce, Granville Sharp, and others, ably exhibited to the 
British public the horrible effects of the trade; pointed out its 
disastrous influence upon the peaceful communities of Africa; 
showed its agency in the disintegration of African society, and 
in the feuds and guerrillas which distracted the African Coast; 
discovered it as depopulating the continent, and giving rise to 
multifarious and indescribable evils; and proposed as a remedy 
the immediate abolition of the traffic. 

In 1792, Mr. H. Thornton, Chairman of the Sierra Leone 
Company, said, in the course of a discussion consequent upon 
a motion made by Mr. Wilberforce for the abolition of the 
slave-trade; “It had obtained the name of & trade, and many 
had been deceived by the appellation; but it was a war , not a 
trade. It was a mass of crimes , and not commerce. It alone 
prevented the introduction of trade into Africa. It created 
more embarrassments than all the natural impediments of the 
country, and was more hard to contend with than any diffi¬ 
culties of climate, soil, or natural disposition of the people.” 

The slave-traders, by pampering their cupidity, had so ingra¬ 
tiated themselves with the native rulers of the country, and 
had acquired such an influence on the coast, that nothing could 
be suffered which would at all interfere with the activity of the 
trade. The establishment of any settlement or colony opposed 
to the traffic was, of course, out of the question, unless pro¬ 
tected by powerful forts and garrisons. 


LIBERIA—PAST,* PRESENT, AND FUTURE. 9 

The close of the eighteenth century, when experience had 
proved the traffic to be at variance with the laws of God, and 
an outrage upon humanity, witnessed the inauguration of vig¬ 
orous efforts on the part of the philanthropists of England for 
the destruction of its legality. Mr. Wilberforce liaving intro¬ 
duced the motion into Parliament “ that the trade carried on 
by British subjects for the purpose of obtaining slaves on the 
African Coast ought to be abolished,” the friends of the motion 
ceased not in their efforts until, on the 10th of February, 1807, 
a committee of the whole House passed a bill “that no vessel 
should clear out for slaves from any port within the British 
dominions after May 1, 1807,” fifteen years after the introduc¬ 
tion of Mr. Wilberforce’s motion. The legality of the traffic 
being thus overthrown by England, and by other nations fol¬ 
lowing in her wake, its horrors on the coast manifestly de¬ 
clined, and honorable commerce could again be prosecuted with 
some measure of safety. 

It was during the temporary immunity of the coast from the 
horrors attendant upon the slave-trade, caused by the passage 
of the British “Abolition Act,” that*the colony of Liberia, the 
anniversary of whose national independence we to-day cele¬ 
brate, was founded. The brief interval or repose enjoyed by 
West Africa furnished an opportunity to certain philanthro¬ 
pists in America to carry out an idea which had originated 
years previously of planting on the coast of Africa a colony of 
civilized Africans, but which had seemed impracticable on ac¬ 
count of the unlimited and pernicious sway which the slavers 
held on the coast. 

In the year 1816, a Society was organized, under the title of 
the “American Colonization Society,” for the purpose of colo¬ 
nizing in Africa, with their own consent, free persons of color 
of the United States. In 1820, the necessary preparations 
having been made, the ship Elizabeth, the Mayflower of Libe¬ 
rian history, sailed from the United States with a company of 
eighty-eight emigrants for the West Coast of Africa. After 
various trials and difficulties, they landed on Cape Mesurado, 
and succeeded in establishing themselves. But scarcely had 
they intrenched themselves when the slavers, a few of whom 
still hovered on the coast, and had factories in the vicinity of 


10 


LIBERIA—PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. 


Mesurado, began to manifest their hostility to the settlers, en¬ 
deavoring in every possible way to break up the settlement; 
while the aboriginal neighbors of the colonists, finding that the 
presence of the colony was diminishing very considerably their 
gains from the unhallowed trade, indulged a lurking enmity, 
which only awaited opportunity to develop itself. But the 
opportunity was not long in offering, for the colony was hardly 
two years old when it was desperately assailed by untold num¬ 
bers of savages, who came down in wild ferocity upon the 
feeble and defenseless company, and must have swept away 
every-trace of them had not a merciful Providence vouchsafed 
deliverance to the weak. The settlers triumphed against 
overwhelming odds. 

The slave-traders, notwithstanding the signal defeat of their 
native allies in the nefarious traffic, were not willing to aban¬ 
don a scene which for scores of years they had unmolestedly 
and profitably infested. They still lingered about the settle¬ 
ment. “ From eight to ten, and even fifteen, vessels were en¬ 
gaged at the same time in this odious traffic almost under the 
guns of the settlement; and in July of the same year, (1825,) 
contracts were existing for eight hundred slaves to be furnished 
in the short space of four months within eight miles of the 
Cape.”* During the same year, Mr. Ashmun, Superintendent 
of the colony, as Agent of the American Colonization Society, 
wrote to the Society: “The colony only wants the right, it 
has the power, to expel this traffic to a distance, and force it 
at least to conceal some of its worst enormities.” From this 
time the Society began to take into consideration the impor¬ 
tance of enlarging the territory of the colony, and thus includ¬ 
ing within its jurisdiction several tribes, in order both to protect 
the settlement against the evil of too great proximity to slave 
factories, and to place it within the competency of the colo¬ 
nial authorities to “expel the traffic to a distance.” But even 
after the limits of the colony had been greatly extended, and 
several large tribes brought under its jurisdiction, the slavers 
would every now and then attempt to renew their old friend¬ 
ships, and frequently occasioned not a little trouble to the col- 


* Gurley’s life of Ashmun. 



LIBERIA—PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. 


11 


onists by exciting the natives to acts of insubordination and 
hostility against the colony. 

The feelings of some of the natives, who had surrendered 
themselves to Liberian authority, became, under the guidance 
of the “marauding outlaws,” so embittered against the colony 
that they more than once boldly professed utter indifference to 
the laws of Liberia. This, together with the fact that every 
once in a while slavers would locate themselves, erect barra- 
coons, and purchase slaves on Liberian territory, under the 
countenance and protection of aboriginal chiefs, rendered sev¬ 
eral “wars” against the latter necessary, in order to. convince 
them that Liberians had power to compel them to obedience. 
The news of the presence of slave-traders on any part of the 
Liberian Coast would make Liberians lay aside their peaceful 
occupations, put on their armor, and cheerfully go through the 
roughest and most fatiguing campaign. If there was fighting 
to be done, they went into it as trained soldiers, with an un¬ 
flagging courage, inspired by a sense of the justice of their 
cause. If there was no fighting, they gladly returned to their 
homes, leaving the aborigines undisturbed, but impressed with 
a salutary lesson of the promptness and determination with 
which the Liberians were bent on putting down the slave- 
trade. The last war of this character was carried, in 1849, to 
Mew-Cess, a region of country about eighty miles southeast of 
Monrovia. The condign punishment inflicted upon the slavers 
by that military expedition, the regular cruising of the Libe¬ 
rian Government vessels, and the scattering of settlements at 
various points, have entirely driven away the slavers from the 
Liberian Coast. The country, in consequence has enjoyed a 
grateful repose, and the aborigines have been peaceably prose¬ 
cuting a legitimate traffic both with Liberians and foreigners. 

A slight interruption to this state of things occurred, how¬ 
ever, in 1857 and 1858. A new element of discord was intro¬ 
duced on the Liberian Coast in the shape of the enlistment of 
emigrants by French vessels. These vessels visited the coast 
for the ostensible purpose of employing free laborers for the 
French West-India colonies. Of course it was understood or 
presumed that all emigrants embarking on board these vessels 
did so of their own accord. If this had been the case, the 


12 


LIBERIA—PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. 


trade would have been as lawful as any emigration trade. But 
it must be borne in mind that the aborigines are not settled 
along the coast in independent republican communities. They 
are under the most despotic rule, the king or head man having 
absolute control over his boys. All the employer of emigrants 
had to do, then, was to offer, which he did, liberal conditions 
to the chiefs for the number of laborers required. The chiefs 
immediately sent around and compelled their boys to come; 
or, if they had not a sufficient number of their own people to 
answer to the demand, predatory excursions were made, in 
which they kidnapped the weak and unsuspecting; or a pre¬ 
text was assumed for a war with a neighboring tribe. Cruelty, 
bloodshed, carnage ensued. Prisoners were taken, driven down 
to the beach, and handed over to the captain of the emigrant 
ship, who—his business being to employ all the laborers he 
could get—did not stop to inquire as to the method em¬ 
ployed for obtaining the parties brought to him. The result 
was, a state of things as bad as that occasioned by the slave- 
trade in its most flourishing period. The bond which we had 
hoped Liberia had formed for the linking together of tribe to 
tribe in harmonious intercourse and mutual dependence was 
thus rudely snapped asunder. The natives, according to com¬ 
plaints made by some of them to the Liberian Government, 
were being agitated with reciprocal fears and jealousies, their 
lives and property were in danger, and a check was imposed 
upon all their industrious efforts. 

Just as the Liberian Government was taking steps by diplo¬ 
matic proceedings to put a stop to this false and injurious 
system of emigration from its shoresman occurrence took place 
which, though sad, clearly developed the character of the 
system and permanently arrested its operations on the coast. 
In the early part of 1858, the Begina Coeli, a French ship en¬ 
gaged in the enlistment of laborers, in the manner described 
above, was lying at anchor off Manna, a trading point a few 
leagues northwest of Monrovia, having on board between two 
and three hundred emigrants, among whom, in cpnsequence of 
some of their number being manacled, considerable dissatisfac¬ 
tion prevailed. During the absence of the captain and the 
chief officer a quarrel broke out between the cook and one of 


LIBERIA—PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. 13 

the emigrants. The cook struck the emigrant, the latter re¬ 
taliated, when a scuffle ensued, in which other emigrants took 
part. This attracted the attention of the rest of the crew, who? 
coming to the assistance of the cook, violently heat the emi¬ 
grants, killing several of them. By this time those emigrants 
who had been confined below were unshackled. They repaired 
in haste to the deck, took part in the fight, and killed alb the 
crew, save one man, who fled aloft and protested most earnestly 
his freedom from any participation in oppressing them. List¬ 
ening to his piteous cries, they spared his life, but ordered him 
ashore forthwith. 

The surviving emigrants, having sole charge of the vessel, 
awaited the arrival of the captain, to dispatch him as soon as 
he touched the deck. But he, learning their design, did not 
venture on board, but sought and obtained aid from the Libe¬ 
rian authorities at Cape Mount, to keep the exasperated savages 
from stranding the vessel. The unfortunate ship was sub¬ 
sequently rescued and towed into Mesurado roads. Thus ended 
the operations of the French emigration system on the coast 
of Liberia. 

In 1861, the Liberian Government having learned that a 
Spanish slaver had secretly entered the Gallinas river, within 
Liberian territory, for the purpose of purchasing slaves, imme¬ 
diately sent the Government schooner Quail to capture the 
invader. Meanwhile news of the slaver also reached the cap¬ 
tain of an English man-of-war, then in the vicinity. The im¬ 
petuous British officer, hurrying to the scene, took the business 
out of the hands of the Liberian man-of-war, captured and 
utterly destroyed the slaver. Complaints were at once made 
by the crew of the demolished vessel to certain Spanish officials 
at Fernando Fo of what had happened in Liberian waters, rep¬ 
resenting the vessel as a lawful trader. The Government of 
Fernando Po, without any preliminary inquiries of the Govern¬ 
ment of Liberia, and with the same precipitancy which marked 
the commencement of the recent abortive war against Chili, 
sent a Spanish gunboat to Monrovia to chastise, as it was 
alleged, the Liberians, by destroying their capital; but she was 
so warmly received by our batteries and by the Government 
schooner Quail, then lying in the harbor, and gallantly com- 


14 


LIBERIA—PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. 

manded by the late Commander James L. Benedict, that she 
found it convenient to effect a precipitate retreat and hasten 
to some neutral port to repair damages. Had there been some 
Pareja on board, he would certainly have made his inglorious 
enterprise memorable by some method as fatal as that adopted 
by the Chilian hero. This occurrence took place on the 11th 
of September, 1861, and was the last blow struck by Liberians 
in self-defense against the aggressions of slave-traders, who are 
irreconcilable in their antipathy to a small community which 
has done more to cripple and destroy their iniquitous opera¬ 
tions on that part of the coast than the combined squadrons of 
England, France, and the United States. 

For about twenty-five years the colony of Liberia remained 
under the control of the American Colonization Society, which 
had planted and up to that time had fostered it. But the So¬ 
ciety could not protect it against the impositions of jealous 
foreigners, who, finding a youthful but growing civilized and 
Christian community on the coast, having no official connec¬ 
tion with any powerful government, did all they could to annoy 
and crush this young people. [The community could not appeal 
to any government for protection—could' not avail itself of the t/ 
rights guaranteed by the law of nations, for it was not a nation^ 
The only way left to the people to secure themselves from an¬ 
noyances and impositions was to assume the control of their 
own political affairs, declare themselves a sovereign and inde¬ 
pendent state, secure recognition, and thus be able to treat 
with foreign nations. The people met in convention, earnestly 
discussed the matter, and agreed to declare themselves an in¬ 
dependent State. The Society interposed no objection, but 
quietly withdrew its supervision and left them to the govern¬ 
ment of themselves. On the twenty-sixth of July, 1847, they 
presented to the world a Declaration of Independence. 

The nationality of Liberia then came into existence under 
peculiar circumstances. Our independence was achieved peace¬ 
ably, without the accessories of battle and smoke, the noise of 
the warrior, and garments rolled in blood. When, therefore, 
we speak of the independence of Liberia, we do not speak of 
it in an antagonistic or aggressive sense as against any other 
nation, but simply in a particular, individual, or distinctive 


LIBERIA—PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. 


15 


sense, in contradistinction to, or separation from, any other 
nation. 

But peaceably and quietly as this nationality has been 
brought about, it has done and is now doing immense good. 
|The declaration of the independence of Liberia, the establish¬ 
ment of the first republican government on the western shores 
of Africa, did not, it is true, solve any intricate problem in the 
history of nations. It did not shed any new light upon mankind 
wfith reference to the science of government. It was not the 
result of the elaboration of any novel principle in politics. But 
it has poured new vigor into the poor, dying existence of the 
African all over the world. It has opened a door of hope for 
a race the long-doomed victims of oppression. It has animated 
colored men everywhere to fresh endeavors to prove themselves 
men. It has given the example of a portion of this despised 
race, far away in the midst of heathenism and barbarism, 
under the most unfavorable circumstances, assuming the re¬ 
sponsibilities and* coming forward into the ranks of nations; 
and it has demonstrated that, notwithstanding the oppression 
of ages, the energies of the race have not been entirely emas¬ 
culated, but are still sufficient to establish and to maintain a 
nationality.^} 

Soon after the Declaration of Independence, we were wel¬ 
comed into the family of nations by Great Britain and France. 
Then followed, one after another, all the great nations of 
Europe, except Bussia, and that great empire has recently 
given us tokens of friendship. The Emperor sent to the capi¬ 
tal of Liberia, in January last, on a complimentary visit, a 
first-class Bussian frigate, the Dneitry Donskoy; and it is ex¬ 
pected that a treaty of amity and commerce will soon be nego¬ 
tiated between Liberia and that great power. We are in 
treaty stipulations with Great Britain, France, the Hanseatic 
States, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, and 
Norway, Italy, Portugal, the United States, and Hayti. The 
LTnited States, though rather tardy in according to us a formal 
acknowledgment, has, nevertheless, always treated us as a de 
facto government. Her squadrons on the coast have always 
been at the service of the Government of Liberia; and their 
gallant officers, whether Northerners or Southerners, Bed Be- 


16 LIBERIA—PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. 

publicans, Abolitionists, or Democrats, have always cheerfully 
responded to the call of our Government; and the highest 
diplomatic representative we have yet had the pleasure of re¬ 
ceiving from abroad is the accomplished Abraham Hanson, 
Esq., United States Commissioner and Consul-General. 

We are now gradually growing in all the elements of na¬ 
tional stability. The resources of the country are daily being 
developed. [Our exports of sugar, coifee, arrow-root, ginger, ^ 
palm-oil, camwood, ivory, etc., are increasing every year—a 
fact that gives assurance of the continued growth, progress, 
and perpetuity of our institutions^ 

The form of our. government is republican. We have copied, 
as closely as possible, after the United States—our legislative, 
judicial, military, and social arrangements being very similar 
to those of that country. A writer in Eraser’s Magazine ‘for 
last month, (June,) in quoting the dictum of Sir George Corn¬ 
wall Lewis, that “man is an historical animal,” says that it is 
“confirmed by the remarkable definiteness with which new 
nations repeat, in embryonic development, the stages through 
which their ancestral nations have passed.” Liberia is another 
illustration, ^n organizing a government for themselves on 
that far-otf coast, there seemed to be an historic necessity that 
the people should adopt the republican form, and adopt it with 
nearly all the defects of the Bepublic whence they had emi¬ 
grated and for which they entertained a traditional reverence. 

But we are learning by experience. The people are now occu¬ 
pied with the discussion of fundamental changes, and it is very 
likely that the ideas of the progressive portion of the Bepublic 
will soon become a part of the organic law of the land; and 
when once the country is freed from the frequent recurrence 
of seasons of political conflicts, which, among a small people, 
must always be injurious, there will be nothing to interfere 
with our progress?^ // 

Our present ruler, the Hon. Daniel B. Warner, is a most 
earnest worker./ From his youth up all his desires seem to 
have been not his own ease and gratification, but work, work, 
work for the building up of his country and the honor of his 
race. He was born in the State of Maryland, and taken by 
his parents to Liberia when about nine years of age. If any 


LIBERIA-PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. 


17 


man has ever earned the presidential chair purely on the 
ground of personal merit, Mr. Warner is that man. He is one 
of the men whom Thomas Carlyle would honor—no sham 
about him. He has worked in nearly all departments of indus¬ 
try, and in each he has left his mark as a stimulus to his 
fellow-citizens and as an inspiring example to the young. He 
has worked as merchant, ship-builder, ship-owner, and agricul¬ 
turist, deeming it important to remove, by his own untiring 
example, whatever foolish feeling there might be as to the 
want of dignity in honest physical labor; and he has, at the 
same time, qualified himself by hard study for the higher de¬ 
partments of national duty. He is of unmixed African descent, 
and therefore owes nothing to hereditary Caucasian bias. He 
is now about fifty years of age, but the soundness of his sense 
and his honorable principles gained the respect and admiration 
of his fellow-citizens while he was still very young, and he was 
elected to distinguished positions when he had not attained 
the constitutional age to fill them. By the most rigid economy 
and personal self-denial, he has succeeded in carrying the [Re¬ 
public safely through the darkest pecuniary season it has ever 
witnessed. All he needs how is to have his hands sustained 
by the devotion of truthful and patriotic men—and there are 
not wanting such in Liberia—and, before he retires from office, 
he will lead the Republic on to an exalted position among the 
nations of the earth. 

t/i Our Constitution does not admit Europeans to the right of 
exercising the elective franchise or of holding real estate/ This 
regulation is protective, and by no means vindictive, as any 
one may readily perceive who will take the trouble to examine 
into our peculiar circumstances. We have again and again 
explained our reasons for this prohibition to the world. Still 
in travelling one meets with persons who, professing great 
knowledge of Liberia, yet pretend to misunderstand—perhaps 
conceiving that they have a right to misunderstand, or a right 
to pretend to misunderstand—our motives for the restriction 
in question. We have frequent suggestions from Europeans, 
and appeals more or less direct, to admit them to the enjoy¬ 
ment of political rights. But as yet we do not deem it safe to 
expose our infant institutions to the influence, which might 
2 



18 


LIBERIA—PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. 


easily become uncontrollable, of unprincipled Europeans who 
would flock in upon us for the sole purpose of enriching and 
aggrandizing themselves without reference to the political 
character and moral progress of the country. 

Owing to our peculiar circumstances, we Cannot just now, as 
the genius and spirit of our republican institutions would lead 
us to do, throw open our doors indiscriminately to all mankind. 
What the United States can do with safety, and perhaps ad¬ 
vantage, and will likely very soon do, we cannot yet do. The 
United States are unbounded in their resources and in their 
assimilating power.* They take up at once and incorporate 
and assimilate the diversified and incongruous elements which 
pour in upon them from all parts of Europe. Liberia cannot 
do this. Our resources—intellectual, physical, moral, and po¬ 
litical—are limited, f 

We have had experience enough, furnished by the condi^pt 
of some of the few Europeans who have lived among us only 
as aliens, to know that, if admitted to the rights of citizenship, 
they would study to build up Liberia only when by so doing 
they also build up themselves. They would honor her laws 
only in those instances in which they could fulfil the expecta¬ 
tions of their own ambition. But in other cases, when the 
matter was reduced to a bare question of the honor of the Be- 
public, the elevation of the African—when the dignity of the 
G-overnment and respectability of the nation were alone con¬ 
cerned—then they would be found exercising the liberty to do 
as they pleased. And what is worst of all.is, that there would 
certainly be produced a very large mixture of blood in the 
country. For even if this mixture could be effected without 
that utter corruption of morals, which is always its concomi¬ 
tant, still this species of amalgamation, however desirable in 
America, would by no means be a matter of congratulation to 
us. The presence of a half-breed population, such as would 
result in that case, would form an element of discord in the 
land, and, instead of being a link between the European and 
the native, would be an instrument in the hand of one for op¬ 
posing the other; and, under its most favorable aspects, such 
a population would be found entirely unsuited to the incipient 


LIBERIA- 


-PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. 


19 


civilization of a new country, and to the task of building up 
new states * 

We believe, therefore, that absolutely and totally to secure 
the Republic from falling into premature political and moral 
decay is absolutely and totally to shut out Europeans, for the 
present, from all interference in our political affairs. 

But we are told in reply to this, “Europeans bring wealth 
into your country, which is indispensable to your speedy 
growth and development.” We do not deny the abounding 
power of wealth. But we do not think it desirable that Li¬ 
beria should grow rich too suddenly. Foreigners who are 
anxious to introduce capital among us for the benefit of the 
country may do so under our present laws with great pecu¬ 
niary advantage to themselves. We believe that we have been 
planted on that c<^ast for purposes higher than mere earthly 
fame and glory. Money and a large population are not all 
that a state needs, j We do not envy the astounding growth 
and rapid enrichment of those countries whose sparkling de¬ 
posits have attracted to their shores, in a short time, countless 
numbers of adventurers; for we know the effect upon the in¬ 
tellectual and moral character of such abnormal material pro¬ 
gress. t\W ealth and luxury have always been the bane of 
rising states.^There are many individuals in Liberia who, if 
they considered wealth the great aim of life, would not have 
left the United States. And I may say of the people of Li¬ 
beria generally, that if they regarded money as a thing of 
transcendent importance they would have long since have 
compromised the independence of their conntry for gold; for 
, if money and luxury are the great ends of life, what does it 
^ signify whether a state be independent or in servitude? 

It may be that in years to come, when the aborigines of the 
country shall have been more generally enlightened, and suffi¬ 
ciently interested in national independence to insure that the 
majority of them shall not be unduly influenced by contact 
with avaricious and unprincipled foreigners, then our Constitu¬ 
tion may be so amended as to admit indiscriminately all man¬ 
kind. If, however we could be sure that only philanthropists 


* Numbers 11,4. 




20 LIBERIA—PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. 

and persons interested in the Christian upbuilding of Africa 
would come among us, we should be disposed to remove the 
restrictions to-morrow. But as we have not that assurance, 
we must be content to surrender for the present all prospects 
of speedy pecuniary advancement for the more desirable acqui¬ 
sition of untrammeled national growth and development. We 
must cheese rather to “ bide our time,” 

“Far from the maddening crowd’s ignoble strife,” 

than fall victims to that excessive refinement and that over¬ 
ripe civilization which are the grave of national honor and 
self-respect. 

In educational matters, we are far in advance of what we 
were a few years ago. We have now a College established 
with its preparatory department, its corjjs of professors, its 
library, and all the appliances which are possessed by youthful 
colleges in America. And there is a prospect that the Alex¬ 
ander High School, a Presbyterian institution, which has been 
instrumental in doing great good in Liberia, but which has 
been for some time suspended, will be re-opened on the banks 
of the St. Paul’s for the purpose of training young men for the 
ministry and missionary work. 

Our great need is a good institution for the training of girls. 
We have been making some effort to supply this serious defi¬ 
ciency ; but as yet our success has been only partial. We 
would wish that some Burdett Coutts of England, or Alexander 
Stewart of Hew York, would give us the means of establishing 
and carrying on such an institution. Such a philanthropist 
would do incalculable good, and inscribe his name indelibly on 
the gratitude of a rising people. 

In religious matters we have also done some good. Most 
wonderful have been the changes which, within a few years, 
the moral and religious aspects of that portion of Africa have 
undergone. Where a few years ago stood virgin forests or 
impenetrable jungle, we now behold churches erected to the 
living Cod, we hear the sound of the church-going bell, and 
regular Sabbath ministrations are enjoyed. If you could see 
Liberia as she now is, with her six hundred miles of coast, 
snatched from the abominations of the slave-trade; her thriv- 


LIBERIA-PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. 21 

ing towns and villages; her spacious streets and fine houses; 
her happy homes, with their varied delights; her churches, 
with their Sabbath-schools, and their solemn and delightful 
services—could you contemplate all the diversified means of 
improvement and enjoyment, the indications on every hand of 
ease and happiness, the plodding industry of her population, 
without those feverish and distracting pursuits and rivalries 
which make large cities so unpleasant—could you behold these 
things and contrast the state of things now with what it was 
forty years ago, when the eighty-eight negro pilgrims first 
landed on those shores, when the primeval forests stood around 
them with their aA^ful unbroken solitudes—could you listen 
as they listened to the rush of the wind through those forests, 
to the roar of wild beasts, and the savage music of the treach¬ 
erous foes all around them—were you, I say, in a position to 
make this contrast, you would certainly exclaim, “What hath 
God wrought!” You would acknowledge that the spirit of 
Christianity and civilization has moved upon the face of those 
turbid waters, and that beauty and order have emerged out of 
materials rude and unpromising. You would recognize on that 
coast a germ of moral renovation, which shall at length burst 
into glorious efflorescence all over the land—the wilderness 
and the desert shall bloom and blossom as the rose. 

And this work will certainly advance with wonderfully in¬ 
creased velocity, when the thousands of our brethren in Amer¬ 
ica, who are evidently destined to achieve the mighty and 
glorious task of building up the waste places of their father- 
land, shall come over and help us. The personal freedom, 
which they have just received in so astounding a manner, is 
an indication—an earnest of the fuller freedom to be bestoAved 
upon Africa. The song of triumph which, on the morning - of 
their resurrection from the dark and dismal grave of slavery, 
echoed on the banks of the Mississippi, the Tennessee, the 
Potomac, the James—the gladsome shout everywhere heard, 

“ It must be now the kingdom coming, 

And the year of Jubilo, : ’ 

is yet to be re-echoed along the rivers and on the mountain- 
tops of Africa. The deep interest now being taken by Christian 
philanthropists all over the United States in the general in- 


22 LIBERIA—PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. 

struction of the freedmen is an inspiration from above. It is 
furnishing an important element in the preparation which the 
exiles need before entering upon their inheritance in the land 
of their fathers. 

Any one who has travelled at all in Western Africa, especially 
in the interior of Liberia, and has seen how extensive and 
beautiful a country, marvelously fertile, lies uninhabited, with 
its attractive and perennial verdure overspreading the hills 
and valleys, cannot but come to the conclusion that this beau- 
tious domain is in reserve for a people who are to come and 
cultivate it; and we can see no people so well prepared and 
adapted for this work as the negroes of the United States. 
They are now in America carried away by fascinating and ab¬ 
sorbing speculations about the rights and privileges they are 
to enjoy in that land. ^Numerous politicians are endeavoring 
to advance their own ambitious purposes by agitating ques¬ 
tions of the black man’s future in the United States. But 
unless they can succeed in thoroughly altering the estimation 
of the negro entertained by the mass of white men in that 
country—unless they can effectually remove the predominant, 
if not instinctive, feeling that he is in some way an alien and 
an inferior being—unless they can succeed in bringing to pass 
general and honorable amalgamation, so as to render the social 
and domestic interests of the two peoples identical—they will 
contribute really nothing to the solution of the black man’s 
difficulties. I |The agitation they are keeping up will result only 
in the determination by the white man in the different States 
of the exact proportion of self-government to be doled out to 
the man of color; and it matters not what may be the extent 
of political rights and privileges which may be thus conferred, 
deprived of the ability to rise in the social scale, according to 
his personal merit, as Europeans can, the black man will always 
find his condition anomalous and galling. If intelligent and 
enterprising, he will not be content with political position and 
influence, with finding himself respected and honored in polit¬ 
ical gatherings, for political purposes raised to the stars at 
public meetings, and on returning home finding his family, 
his mother and sisters, pining and withering under the influ¬ 
ence of social caste. It will be worse than a descent from the 


LIBERIA-PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. 


23 


! 


sublime to the ridiculous, for it will not be altogether of the 
character of an occasional transition ; but it will be a continued 
and pervading state of elevation on the one hand and degrada¬ 
tion on the other. Of much that is desirable and pleasant 
united to a great deal that is mortifying, annoying, and humil¬ 
iating, the political and social counterpart of the artistic and 
literary incongruity which Horace ridicules when 

“ turpiter atrum 

• Desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne.” * 

Black men of refinement and energy of character will feel 
more sensitively than ever the burden of existence in America; 
they will appreciate more and more keenly the enormous diffi¬ 
culties in the way of their ever enjoying full political rights 
‘and privileges in a country in which they must maintain an 
ever-increasing numerical inferiority. They will find that, 
under such circumstances, in a popular government, a people 
cannot grow in all the elements of a true and perfect manhood, 
but must limp through life with crippled energies, always in 
the rear of their superiors in number. They will then come to 
a wiser interpretation of their mission and destiny. Abandon¬ 
ing the disappointing and fretful illusions which harrass them 
in the land of their birth, they will look abroad for some scene 
of untrammeled growth, and Africa will, without doubt, be 
the final home and field of operation for thousands, if not mil¬ 
lions, of them. And the powerful • agency that will thus be 
brought into that land—of family influences and the diversified 
appliances of civilized life in the various mechanical, agricul¬ 
tural, commercial, and civil operations—will rapidly renovate 
the spirit and character of the African communities, and whole 
tribes, brought under the pervading influence of Christian prin¬ 
ciples, will be incorporated among us ; and then Anglo-Ameri¬ 
can Christianity, liberty, and law, under the protection of the 
Liberian flag, will have nothing to impede their indefinite 
spread over that immense continent. I say, nothing to im¬ 
pede their indefinite spread j for if we look toward the interior, 
we find the aborigines tractable and anxious for improvement. 
They do not, as the people of these Eastern countries, cling to 


* Ars Poetica, 3, 4. 



24 


LIBERIA—PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. 


old customs because they are old. They are not so wedded to 
their old practices, to the mental and moral habitudes of their 
ancestors, as to prefer, like the American Indians, rather to 
surrender life itself than their old ways. They have no hoary 
systems, venerable with the dust of centuries, which they feel 
bound to uphold. When colonization presents itself to their 
doors, the old state of things gradually dies, apparently a natural 
death, without violence or any desperate struggle—it dies amid 
the tears and embraces of the aged, who love it because it 
nursed their infancy, supported their manhood, and furnishes 
the retrospect of their old age, but who with quiet resignation 
see it fall into decay, exclaiming, in melancholy yet hopeful 
accents, with reference to the future, “I am too old for this, 
teach it to my children.” If then we only had the civilized, 
population to advance our settlements into the interior, Libe¬ 
rian rule would be everywhere gladly accepted. If, on the 
other hand, we look along the West Coast, we find, here and 
there, European possessions, but held for the most part merely 
as military stations, fortresses, and harbors of refuge for their 
naval and mercantile interests. / Ho large expenditures have 
been made for their extension or aggrandizement; and even if 
it should not be possible for the Republic to acquire them in 
the course of time, in an honorable and quiet manner, still they 
will never rise to sufficient importance to cause us external 
anxieties or to become elements of international discord. j 
How, ladies and gentlemen, Christian friends and brethren, 
in recapitulation and conclusion, I point you to a score of 
thousands of Christian emigrants and their descendants from 
the United States engaged in a work of the grandest import¬ 
ance. When, forty years ago, the small band of eighty colored 
persons settled on Cape Mesurado, far away, nearly five thou- 
and miles across the sea, from the place of their birth, in a 
strange and insalubrious climate, surrounded by hostile tribes 
and other unpropitious influences, owning only a few acres of 
land, no one would have supposed that in less than forty years, 
in the lifetime of some of the Settlers, that people would so en¬ 
large and spread themselves, so extend their influence as to 
possess over six hundred miles of coast, holding under their 
jurisdiction over two hundred thousand souls. Tribes which, 


LIBERIA—-PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. 


25 


when they 'first landed on those shores, could easily have over- 
whelmed them and swept them into the sea, they now compel 
to cease intercourse with the slave-traders, to forget their mu¬ 
tual feuds in obedience to Christian law, and to cease from 
wars and bloodshed. They induce them instead of the sword 
to use the plowshare, and instead of the spear the pruning- 
hook. And, as I have told you, this influence is growing. 
Liberia is known and respected for hundreds of miles in the 
interior, and a great work is being accomplished. 

If in our higher institutions of learning we could furnish the 
means of Arabic education, so as to put our missionaries and 
I enterprising young men in possession of a fair knowledge of 
that language, to enable them to hold intelligent intercourse 
with the Mussulmans who throng our interior, and who will 
increase among us as our settlements extend back from the 
coast, I am persuaded that we should attract to ourselves and 
beneath our influence, as to a common centre, thousands of the 
vagrant Moslems, who wander as traders . or propagandists of 
their faith throughout the interior of West Africa, It is 
because of the great importance which I attach to this subject 
that I am among you to-day. When the means were granted 
me by friends in America to travel for the improvement of my 
impaired health wherever I pleased, I chose to come among 
you to see how much Arabic I could gather in the short time 
I might have to spend here to take back to Africa. 

Though the time during which I shall sojourn among you is 
extremely short, for the very ambitious object of learning a 
foreign and difficult language, yet I am glad I have come. I 
have already learned a great deal which I could not have 
learned merely from books. Indeed, it is impossible for one 
not to learn some Arabic, however short one’s residence may 
be here. The air is impregnated with it; it is taken in on the 
food one eats and the water one drinks; it is inhaled with 
every breath; it is absorbed through every pore, until, after 
a while, it becomes a settled habit of life and is worn as regu¬ 
larly as a daily garment. 

But, apart from the study of Arabic, my residence among 
you will be to me one of the most interesting events in the 
history of my life, and the coming together of so intelligent an 
3 


26 


LIBERIA-PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. 


assembly on this occasion, to show their respect for and sym¬ 
pathy with my country, must take an imperishable place in 
my memory. Sure I am that the heart of every Liberian, who 
shall hear of the proceedings of to-day, w T ill swell with delight¬ 
ful and grateful emotion, to know that the flag of his country 
has been honored in this distant land, and upon this “ goodly 
mountain,” distinguished in Holy Writ as the place which, 
above all others, the aged patriarch and leader of Israel desired, 
ere his death, to behold.* 

I congratulate you and bid you God-speed in the noble work 
you are doing here^—in this land so highly favored in ancient 
times. May you succeed in speedily arousing its slumbering, 
inhabitants from the sleep of ages, in overcoming their apathy, 
and subjugating their prejudices by Christian education and 
culture. 

I beg to tender the greetings of Liberia-College to the im¬ 
portant institution—the Syrian Protestant College—now rising 
under your auspices. The two institutions bear a striking 
similarity to each other. They are alike in the grandeur of 
their conception and the magnificence of their purpose; alike 
in the importance of their location on the borders of great 
needy countries; alike in the awful responsibility resting upon 
them. May they be happily alike in successful efforts to roll 
away the clouds of darkness, prejudice, and selfishness now 
enveloping the millions of minds upon which it will be their 
part, either directly or indirectly, to operate! 

I trust that we may be able to send you from Liberia College 
a youth to enter the Syrian College, for the cultivation of an 
acquaintance with the Arabic language and literature, to return 
and introduce it into Liberia.f 

Thus the two colleges, conceived by American philanthropy, 
founded by American benevolence, and fostered by American 
and English Christians, may be able to present to the world 
ere long, in the two countries, some of the best characters and 
best minds of the age, as the natural and genuine products of 


* Deut. 3: 25. 

fRev. Dr. W. M. Thomson, author of “The Land and the Book,” who was 
present, suggested that two or three youths ought to be sent. 



Liberia—past, present, and future. 


27 


an advancing civilization, and an impressive illustration of the 
spirit and power of a pure Christianity. 

I cannot, for my part, escape the conviction that the found* 
ing of these two colleges, almost simultaneously, is the pledge 
given by God of better days for these Eastern countries; that 
all the coarser passions and brutal instincts and superstitions 
of the people shall rapidly disappear amid the increasing and 
abounding light of knowledge and love. 

“ Even now we hear, with inward strife, 

A motion toiling in the gloom; 

The spirit of the years to come 
Yearning to mix itself with life.” 




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